On the timed text tracks, I would (once again) like to suggest that
rather than inventing yet another form of timed text, the WHATWG look at
the work on smilText. This format can be dropped into HTML-5 with little
or no change and provides the following advantages:
1. It supports absoulte and relative timing of text fragments,
2. It allows CSS to be used for styling text objects
3. It is intuitive for hand-authors, but can also be generated
4. It is structured into a basic module, a styling module and a text
motion module, so that growth is possbile
5. It can be supported in an external file as a streaming format or in-line.
The disadvantages?
1. It was not invented by this group.
For full information, see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SMIL/smil-text.html
(Note that this includes some HTML structuring into SMIL; obviously,
these constructs would not be redefined for inclusion into HTML.)
(There is also an external variant, at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SMIL/smil-text-profile.html
)
-d.